Tonight I learned I’m not the only nerd in the apartment complex. Four of us played Betrayal at House on the Hill.
I’ve been looking for a crew for a while to play King of New York and then maybe start cutting into my bookshelf of shame.
I have a bookshelf of shame.
If officials from Turkey are to be believed, the whole diversion ploy was for nothing. It was a ruse by Netanyahu to interfere with negotiations.
Trump keeps getting played on the international stage like a big ol’ bassoon.
According to the studies I’ve read, productivity increases when workers are mandated to stop work beyond eight hours a day; are mandated to take their fifteen minute breaks and their hour-long lunch break (and to actually eat a lunch); are mandated to leave work on Friday and take a weekend.
This was demonstrated to be effective even concerning workers who obsess on their job and voluntarily work through their breaks, or into the evening, or over the weekend. Breaks from work are good for everyone.
Productivity also increases when you switch to a four-day work-week (at eight hours a day).
Productivity also increases when you commute less, as we learned with telecommuting during the COVID-19 lockdown.
So why do bosses crunch? Why do they create a social climate that pressures workers to skip breaks? Why do they insist on more than the 40-hour work week? Why do they issue RTO mandates?
Pure vindictiveness. The ownership class resents that their workforce has needs and opinions, and wants them to suffer for it, even when a miserable crew reduces profits and dividends.
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According to the studies I’ve read, productivity increases when workers are mandated to stop work beyond eight hours a day; are mandated to take their fifteen minute breaks and their hour-long lunch break (and to actually eat a lunch); are mandated to leave work on Friday and take a weekend.
This was demonstrated to be effective even concerning workers who obsess on their job and voluntarily work through their breaks, or into the evening, or over the weekend. Breaks from work are good for everyone.
Productivity also increases when you switch to a four-day work-week (at eight hours a day).
Productivity also increases when you commute less, as we learned with telecommuting during the COVID-19 lockdown.
So why do bosses crunch? Why do they create a social climate that pressures workers to skip breaks? Why do they insist on more than the 40-hour work week? Why do they issue RTO mandates?
Pure vindictiveness. The ownership class resents that their workforce has needs and opinions, and wants them to suffer for it, even when a miserable crew reduces profits and dividends.
We were pretty much onboard with helping Ukraine, and were providing intelligence and selling them arms.
But Trump is totally a Russian asset, or was at the time. (Russia spent a lot of resources and manpower on Trump’s 2016 campaign.) Nowadays, Trump might be catching on that Putin has absolutely no respect for him.
Holy shit, the laundry room fire story is real.
It’s a bad era to be in the Navy.
Possibly not the best example, then.
FOX News is possibly the most honed outlet of the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership.
It offers a diet of fear, rage and bigotry, and then seasons it with red-pill conspiracy theories, implying that everyone else is lying to you, but FOX knows better. It encourages its viewers to reject all other sources, so that you’re watching news in a silo. Just FOX and you.
And this is the carrier by which it feeds you culture war and a narrow, extremist ideology.
And we know it works. Presidents, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices will regurgitate FOX talking points verbatim, using the very same words in the same order, when expressing opinions and passing policy.
We’ve known for a long time human beings are fallible. Fox Mulder tells Robert Modell his shoes are untied and he looks. Societies regulate gambling, outlaw false advertising, investigate confidence ploys, because we know humans can be tricked. Cybercrime divisions take phishing seriously because we know that the weakest link in the security chain is between chair and keyboard.
So it’s interesting that Ronald Reagan, as part of deregulation, had his FCC end fairness doctrine regarding news media, opening the gateway for conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh and eventually Murdock’s new project to change minds, the FOX News channel. We’ve known that humans can be sown into panic since Orson Welles’ radio drama of War of the Worlds.
So yeah, we’re being subjected to what is literal mind control, and our government isn’t doing a thing to stop it. But at the same time we’re in the age of prediction markets and online sports betting, and our respective protection bureaus have stood down, so it’s not exactly like our state is watching to make sure we’re not being defrauded.
During Trump 1.0 there was the controversy of whether Putin has Kompromat on Trump in the form of videos of Trump engaging in watersports. They never emerged, but since then it’s been super clear that even his family values oriented Evangelist Christian followers are eager to forgive him for anything.
Hence the hypothetical that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and never lose a single vote.
In fact, he loses MAGA voters all the time, but one at a time, after they’ve deconstructed their own loyalty and come to accept they’ve been played. (It raises the question if they’ve actually learned empathy, that programs that help the undeserved might help them and theirs as well, but they seem to consistently quit MAGA when they come to terms that they’ve been harmed, themselves.)
Are there pictures of him blowing Bubba? There’s already enough evidence out there that he’s sexually assaulted teen girls. If that’s not enough to turn the base (and the courts) against Teflon Don then I doubt that a gay act or a deviant sex act would do it either.
The whole MAGA movement is following the pattern regarding cult leaders to a T: The leader is given exception to rules and is immune to judgement.
Iran now has proof of concept, that closing the Strait of Hormuz serves as a deterrent for war as good as the capacity of nuclear response. In fact, it’s better in that it’s more useful. No nation yet dares to actually use nukes that they have (for instance, Russa hasn’t threatened nuclear escalation as the US and Europe support Ukraine, and Ukraine might still join NATO.) Closing the strait does economic damage, but much less physical damage, so it’s Iran is freer to close the strait more readily than they could be with any nuclear weapon.
So now Iran has shown that power, it is stronger for it on the international stage, and as a result Israel is now weaker. We’re already seeing this as Iran uses the closed strait to pressure the US to, in turn, pressure Israel to stop attacking Syria.
If Netanyahu hadn’t pressured the US to attack Iran, then the IDF could probably continue to war on Syria without Iran closing the strait, and the US would not be under pressure by Iran. Also the people of the US might disapprove of Israel less and the influence of AIPAC money in US elections would likely be less of an issue. There’s also pressure in the US for Congress to stop budgeting for materiel for Israel.
Recently, Israel intended an air strike on a plane full of Iranian negotiators, but the US warned Tehran about it and the plane was diverted, so we’re already seeing signs that the alliance between the US and Israel is under stress.
This seems to be a recurring problem, of strongman leaders who allegedly love their country and people making terrible decisions starting elective wars.
Trump is a fool and a conman and just wanted to blow up brown people, but Netanyahu, for instance, should have known better.
Chelsea is a great enby name.
This isn’t about justice, this is about billionaires paying enough to make an example out of him.
MEGAUpload cooperated with law enforcement when they asked. The charges were trumped up by the record labels. And it’s likely they were less afraid of the piracy and more afraid of the new free music launch featuring a bunch of migrating artists.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I’d be willing to devote taxes to social media without ads and featuring a non-malevolent algorithm. If it allowed people to communicate with each other like Twitter or Facebook, it would be a service to the benefit of the public.
Once upon a time, at least here in the states, we believed in a government that served the public good.
It doesn’t matter. Buddha is Buddha.
Authoritarianism is far right along the spectrum, and liberalism is center, center-right or center-left depending on the specific tenets set by the movement. (There are multiple liberalisms out there.)
Neoliberalism as practiced by the US Democratic Party and the UK Labor Party is right wing.
I moved in April and had to pair down.